misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all
the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a
damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere
apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but
every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The
subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the
poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.

And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and
everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. "There is indeed
one element in human destiny," Robert Louis Stevenson writes, "that not
blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do,
we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted."[71] And
our nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that
theologians should have held it to be essential, and thought that only
through the personal experience of humiliation which it engenders the
deeper sense of life's significance is reached?[72]

[71] He adds with characteristic healthy-mindedness: "Our business is
to continue to fail in good spirits."

[72] The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal
against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion
of this world. To our own consciousness there is usually a residuum of
worth left over after our sins and errors have been told off--our
capacity of acknowledging and regretting them is the germ of a better
self in posse at least. But the world deals with us in actu and not in
posse: and of this hidden germ, not to be guessed at from without, it
never takes account. Then we turn to the All-knower, who knows our
bad, but knows this good in us also, and who is just. We cast
ourselves with our repentance on his mercy only by an All-knower can we
finally be judged. So the need of a God very definitely emerges from
this sort of experience of life.

But this is only the first stage of the world-sickness. Make the human
being's sensitiveness a little greater, carry him a little farther over
the misery-threshold, and the good quality of the successful moments
themselves when they occur is spoiled and vitiated. All natural goods
perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth
and health and pleasure vanish. Can things whose end is always dust
and disappointment be the real goods which our souls require? Back of
everything is the great